It's been a while. But we've been hard at work. Gonna have some really cool stuff for you in the upcoming weeks. However, I want to show you this first:

This is a screenshot of Lambaste mode - a survival/wave mode where you build up your center defenses against endless waves of Guardians. By investing Catalysts (in-game currency) you can earn them back even more by hiring rebels to help fight with you. It's a neat little system that will be good for the final game when you want to make a little extra money for your town-building projects.

We have a little thing called the Variable system I've added too - which is a lot like the skulls in Halo. But a lot of this will be elaborated on in our January 1st video. So stick around, this is gonna be good.

I'm gonna keep this brief since you'll get a complete lowdown in our next video - but until then.

We're still working - I want to try and have something for you guys on the first, but no promises. The team is kind of busy with real life, and since we have literally no funding I can't just pay anyone to work for us. This is an act of love, so a lot of us have to do this in our free time...

But I digress.

Anyway, Forrest and I have been experimenting with motion capture using some Kinects we had lying around. It's been pretty successful - so you should see some cool stuff come out of that. We plan on taking these mocaps and using that bases to work off of for our more subtle animations (i.e. NPCs talking). More complicated animations like combat and movement will still be hand-animated with key-frame animation, however.

I'm also developing the wave-mode along with all that comes with that. Unfortunately, again, my artists are busy with their jobs and own projects, so progress is gonna be slow until I can release something that's presentable to hopefully garner interest. No worries though, NOKORI·WARE is still going strong. No one's quitting or anything, it's just a slow month with finals and holidays - you know how it is.

I've been doing work on AI as usual - but also working on the tower population/war'ing calculations. I've managed to successfully remove almost all of the random elements form the system, and it's all now based on careful calculations to statistically determine how wars are fought when you aren't around to see them.

To do this, I take the DNA of each AI on the floor and pair them with opponents, and then calculate who would likely win the battle based on their individual personal traits. I also calculate tension levels on the floors and also decide miner casualties based on how reckless the AI are and how honorable they are - all providing for some neat effects. I'm trying to add mroe graphs and data as well so you can carefully monitor population data.

None of the AI in the game respawn - so the war really matters. So I need a good way to present it!

Along with the war'ing systems, I added an "event" system that notifies the player of random happenings on certain floors. It also warns you of the tension levels on the floor so that you can personally go and prevent battles if needed.